Chapter 16: The Power of FinanceMoney cartels and The Financial Filter; Money and credit scarce commodities traded for power favours; Tax and Spend replaced by Spend, Borrow and Tax; National Debt as device to institutionalize usury; Lost opportunity to swap national debt for privatized public company shares.
In the inverted state the financial function calls the shots and the only game it has learnt to play in reaching its ascendancy is to monopolize the issuance of money and credit and release it only to those who would make more money with it or further consolidate the power of the financial mechanism and the financial filter by which it exercises its control.In the inverted state, money and credit is no longer available to provide for the exchange of goods and services and the provision of a stable store of value, the only two legitimate purposes of money and credit, but is instead made a scarce commodity to itself be traded for power favours.
The political mechanism by relinquishing the issuance of money and credit plays a pivotal role in the inversion of society. This has always been understood by the Thomas Paines and the Napoleon Bonapartes as they have attempted to craft constitutions that would guarantee that power flows in the natural way.
This has always been understood by the financial power and the religious power as they have attempted to switch the direction of the power flow at the very high leverage points in each of the other mechanisms by acting on the money and the credit flow as surrogates for power and increasingly so the greater the monetarisation of social action.
It is not enough, argues Dr. Robertson, to give Parliament the power to spend and the power to exact taxes, because all that happens is that the clerks invent the idea of a national debt which blows the whole underlying idea of power to the people sky high.
In Great Britain this extraordinary sabotage of the tax and spending power of the Parliament was first used in 1836. The Money Power lent the Parliament twenty million pounds ‘to abolish slavery’. Quite an irony! It followed it up in 1848 with another nine million pounds for the Irish famine. We the people were on the slippery slope. Next came Disraeli with his purchase of the Suez Canal and the cat was out among the pigeons.
Thomas Paine’s remark that wars were declared to raise taxes and not the other way about was now beside the point. The idea was afoot that Parliaments should turn to the Money Power whenever it had a neat idea. No longer was it Tax and Spend. Now, despite all Gladstone’s efforts (and he brought the national debt down from eight hundred and forty six million pounds in 1816 to six hundred and fifty million pounds in 1914) it was Spend and Borrow…and Tax to service the debt. The power flow had been reversed and was now flowing from the financial mechanism to the industrial mechanism. The sanctions mechanism was now protecting private property, a euphemism for using force to stamp on any attempt to revert the power flow to the natural state.
The administration mechanism, as always, like a reed in the middle of a stream, moved with the flow, its primary concern for ‘keeping the show on the road’ now fed no longer by the high moral principle of implementing political decisions that have flowed from an educated citizenry deliberating under the overarching virtue of a moral law and an ethical code, but working now to the lowest of principles. The piper calls the tune. Might is right and the creed is greed.
Of course the national debt was always explained as a war debt and to this degree Thomas Paine’s remark was well placed. The wars against France and Spain from 1688 to 1775 for instance had put another hundred and twenty eight million pounds on the ledgers and the Napoleonic wars had done their bit with yet another six hundred and seven million pounds.
But this was no different to the age old practice by which the king’s heavy mob extorted money from the moneylenders to pay the soldiers. It accumulated on the books, it was ingeniously transferred from the strong to the weak in the counting house, and eventually it was wiped out by the revolution. The law of force always wiped the slate clean in the end.
But what we have now is something different. It is the institutionalizing of usury as the invisible hand of an invisible tyrant, The Money Power, who directs it to disempower any who would unmask the emperor or remove his crown.
And Oh what a glorious opportunity to topple this power has been missed in Great Britain. How sensible it would have been to call in the debt and abolish it completely giving shares in the real public companies that the Conservative Party ‘privatized’ in return.
Had this been done and had this been followed up by the deprivatization of the Bank of England, then we could have returned to a sane Tax and Spend regime for the public purse.
But it was not to be. Instead it will be the old way once again. Books fiddled in the counting house, the weak dispossessed by the strong, and touch and go between the various historic solutions of the money problem - most of them violent and all of them unpleasant.